News Hostage ROUTINELY blasts Fran and his "random metaphor generator." The probelm with Blinebury is not really Blinebury himself. The problem is the lack of competition he faces. When Mickey Herskowitz (IMO, the best sports columnist in Houston history) writes a column or two a week and your only other competition in sports column writing in the ENTIRE CITY is Dale "Please Don't Hit Me Again Mr. Pastorini" Robertson and John Lopez, why even bother trying. Nothing against these guys, but there's nothing like some good writing competition to make you better and work harder. Blinebury doesn't have to do anything to be any better and, honestly, if there were half a dozen other GOOD columnists writing sports in the city, Blinebury could write whatever he wanted and it would be fine. He'd be like the village idiot and no one would care. As it stands, however, he can write whatever propoganda nonsense he wants based one how well he was treated by one team or player or whatever inane, unfounded slam he desires on someone over a perceived sleight he received (all things that really happened to him), and we just have to grin and bear it because it's the only game in town. The fault lies with the fact that the Chronicle has no legitimate competition since the Post died. As a result, we get Blinebury and Robertson. Thank God the Chron was smart enough to employ Herskowitz or we'd be stuck with a guy who got punched by Pastorini (Robertson), a guy who GUARANTEED that the Rockets were moving when the arena referendum failed in 1999 (Lopez) and a guy who takes every chance possible to remind us that Hakeem Olajuwon will never be replaced (Blinebury) as the only sports columnists in town. What a grim thought.
You DO realize that sports columns are generally written on an 8th grade level, right? I had 3 journalism majors tell me that. They write on that level because 1) kids read the sports page and 2) sometimes it isn't the brightest of people that read ONLY the sports page. BTW...if the ESPN writer has nothing better to do than devote a column to bashing somebody in a local paper that the rest of the country has even heard of...then maybe HE'S the one with the problem. I don't like Blinebury anymore than anybody else. But that ESPN guy is just pathetic. Write about sports instead of trying to tell everybody how much smarter you are than another collumnist.
Ref: Actually, it's sixth grade, but close enough. Journalists do that to cater to the lowest common denominator. If they don't, they lose readership which means lower circulation and lower ad rates.
Yeah, that's why I had to stop writing KegNotes. It was so brilliant it just went over everyone's heads. I tried and tried to dumb it down, but it was just way too sophisticated. What with the jokes about John Stockton buried to his neck in dog**** and such.
Chucky - Most entertaining thread I have ever read here. I need to hangout in the hangout more often. Pipe - Greatest reply to a post ever. That article could not have possibly backed up Chucky's point any better. I wish we could e-mail that to the Editor up at the Chronicle. I can't believe Fran is still working after that. Sports is supposed to be his freaking job. What in the hell does he do in his spare time? It isn't my job and I probably know forty times more random sports facts than that creamy r****d. Hell I spend my saturday mornings posting on a rocket's fan site. He is spreading Nutella on his muffin and watching cartoons. The Antichrist is getting nearer!!!!!!
By Fannie Bunsburied LOUDER than standing next to a roaring jet engine. That's how it sounded. Brighter and more glittering than a Fourth of July fireworks display. That's how it looked. Hotter than five-alarm chili. More fiery than a mouthful of jalapeños. That's how it felt. These are the things I remember when LeGrouper unleashed his AK on me in the Chronicle parking lot. Commas fran, they are called commas. I guess they didn't teach you about sentence fragments at Grandma Bunsburied's school of sports writing.
Yeah, I don't understand a word of this: http://www.clutchcity.net/feature.cfm?FeatureID=104 Write a new one, they're great!!
man if this is how people really feel about sports journalists, maybe i should stop aspiring to write for SI and go back to looking for a software engineering job... at least we make good money and get some amount of respect!
I can't figure out how to quote other people's posts, but if I could, I would put that first paragraph of refman's post here. Use your imagination, it's easier than me figuring something else out on OSX 10.2 (Jaguar rules, btw...) Okay, look. This whole notion that you have to write down to your readers is totally offensive to me -- and this goes way beyond Frannie, of course -- because so much of the media uses it was a cover for lazy and bad writing. Bear with me here, for a moment. (With all respect to Mr. Cullinan) Writing can be judged on a number of levels, but 'mechanics' and 'content' are good places to start. 'Mechanics' reflects readability, 'content' reflects the ideas within. Having quality writing mechanics does not necessarily mean that your writing is difficult, sophisticated and academic -- it can be -- but not necessarily. But you can win alot of mechanics points by being readable. Fine, you can gear your writing towards your reader --one always should -- and it the Chronicle's readership is of a sixth-grade reading level, FINE, write it for sixth graders. But introducing CONTENT that a sixth grade sports reporter could deliver is -- to me -- using the low-funtional-literacy of your readers as an excuse for delivering a lazy, unimaginative, lowbrow product. Forget the writing for a second -- and we'll get back to it -- but Fran's THINKING is of a sixth-grade level. That has always been my first beef with him. He never offers anything other that oafish, exaggerated pedestrian "analysis" - if there was a poster in here who wrote what he wrote, they would be totally ignored becuase it is unremarkable for any sort of insight. It could be written by someone who knows nothing more about basektball -- or sports-- than the most lukewarm houston sports fan. He has access to everyone from Hakeem Olajuwon on down, and every locker room in the city. But no, asking him to deliver an opinion based on some sort of unique or original thought and insight would be too much. He has to find the most obvious, unsophisticated perspective and serve it up like (insert meaningless metphor here). So that's crime #1. Crime #2 is that he is not even readable. His metaphors are unfunny and unmemorable clunkers -- and to get hypercritical for a second, they slow you down as you read. How can you possibly construct a point or argument in a two-sentence paragraph? I would argue that his writing would be HARD for a sixth-grade-reading-level-reader to read, because they contain massively outdated references, 1970's cliches, and no real flow or point. What I actually think is, his columns are all about the titles at the top. Rarely does he write anything that needs those 300 or so words underneath -- he is writing for people who do not even read the column; people who just wat to read the title at the top so they can parrot "The Rockets Are Boring This Year" or "Wow The Texans Played Well and Beat Dallas" to a crowd of people at a noisy bar in Shepherd Plaza. That's why I go crazy over him -- it's the one-two punch. Sixth grade content with mechanics that need an English professor to sort out the ideas. Of course, there are none, so why bother. CBFC
I hadn't read a Keg Note until Rocketman posted the link. That was %^&$^%%$#ing awesome! Why in the hell don't we start a movement here to get Blinebury fired and you installed as new Chronicle sports workhorse. I will start this thread after I finish my little 200mL Saturday Morning Courvoisier. And drapj, yes you should definitely go back looking for your engineering job. If you think Blinebury is something to aspire to, please go back to engineering....
And PS. Just because other writers around the country suck too does not let Fran off the hook. Frannie writies about my freaking Houston Rockets, so his crime is exponentially worse.
oh hell no. I can't stand reading Blineburry's columns. But as an aspiring sportswriter, I never thought about the community backlash that could result from one's columns. I've only received positive praise for my columns on my sports website (so far), so the thought never crossed my mind.
Tell it how it is CBFC!!! Why does houston always get the lame ass sports casters and writers like Blinebury, Calvin Murphy, Michael Murphy, etc... The audience they are targeting is obviously something like my elderly mother and her pug. Why not throw a little at the gen xer's? Oh, I would like to exclude Milo from the list of gay houston sports casters. And Bill W is alright, but he looks as though he is about to die.
Community backlash happens when **** gets out of hand. Blinebury is out of f&*king hand. If I have to see his smiley little stupid face one more time at the top of an article I am going to shake my fist in the air and say: "No sir! I don't like it! I don't like it at all!" BTW I have actually cancelled my subscription to the chronicle because of Blinebury and the other idiots who write in the only important section of the newspaper. I get my news from Clutch!
CBrownFanClub is on fire. And no one is playing the Mock Fran game requested in the title--mocking in the style of that ESPN article. <b>A place where one Houston journalist grovels to when no one will grant him interviews anymore.</b> Hakeem Olajuwon's lap.
Good call, Jeff. CBFC, you are bring out the cruel streak in me. Crueler than a puppy snatching coat maker. Meaner than Hells Angels on hangovers. More vicious than a pack of rabid pit bulls. (jeez, hp, this is harder than you think ) From this week's News Hostage column: http://www.houstonpress.com/issues/2002-09-19/hostage.html/1/index.html View from the Coast In the spirit of Channel 2 general manager Steve Wasserman, we are including here a guest viewpoint. Wasserman always encourages those who oppose his editorials to contact the station; since his editorials tend to run along the lines of "Patriotism is heartwarming" or "Houstonians need to get ready for hurricane season," the number of guests tends to be slim. And, truth be told, we can't really call what follows an opposing viewpoint. We're just glad to see our hometown paper get some big-league publicity. T.J. Simers is an estimable, not to mention reliably acerbic, sports columnist for the Los Angeles Times. On September 10 he examined the NFL's continuing efforts to bring a team to L.A. (Headline: "In the Barnum Tradition, NFL Looking for Suckers.") As he usually does, he took a brief tangent midway to toss in a spare thought. "After the [Houston] Texans won their first game," he wrote, "a sports columnist for the Houston Chronicle wrote: 'The Texans came out like old-time gunslingers, their six-shooters blazing, and served notice there was a new marshal in town.' Just think, if we had gotten the team instead of Houston, I could have written like that." Simers can dream on. He didn't even mention the rest of that Fran Blinebury column, in which the game was described as feeling "Hotter than five-alarm chili. More fiery than a mouthful of jalapeños…It was tastier than a corny dog at the State Fair, the wildest ride since they shut down the mechanical bull at Gilley's." Christ -- a Gilley's reference? The West Coast may be laughing, but loyal -- or trapped -- Chronicle readers know they can only be thankful they didn't have to read something like "Houston, we don't have a problem!" houstonpress.com | originally published: September 19, 2002
You know where those clumsy metaphors come from? Rick Reilly. Reilly is exceptionally good at clever metaphor, and since he's basically the standard to which the Fran Blineburys of the world aspire, we're now deluged with writers trying their best to imitate him. The same phenomenon can be seen by watching local sportscasters desperately try for a "Boo-yah!" of their own. Not sure if this is the case in Houston, but we see it in Austin.
